Smith, Bessie (Elizabeth)

Smith, Bessie (Elizabeth) , American blues singer and songwriter; b. Chattanooga, Term., April 15, 1894; d. Clarksdale, Miss., Sept. 26, 1937. Smith was the most successful early blues singer on records and a major influence on all the blues and jazz singers who followed her. Her 160 recordings, made between 1923 and 1933, featured such jazz performers as Fletcher Henderson, Louis Armstrong, James P. Johnson, Jack Teagarden, Chu Berry, and Benny Goodman. She sold between five and ten million copies during her lifetime and continued to sell for decades after.

Smith was the daughter of William and Laura Smith, both of whom died during her childhood, leaving her to be raised in poverty by a sister. She sang in school plays and in a girls choir as well as on the streets. She first sang onstage at the age of nine at the Ivory Theatre in Chattanooga in an amateur contest. In 1912 she joined the Moses Stokes vaudeville troupe as a dancer, where she met blues singer Ma Rainey. She performed in vaudeville during the 1910s and early 1920s, gradually achieving prominence. During this period she was seen by record executive Frank Walker at a club in Selma, Ala. When Walker became recording director of Columbia Records in 1923, he sent for her.

Smith’s first recording sessions, in February 1923, produced “Down Hearted Blues,” released by Columbia on June 7, 1923; it sold 780, 000 copies within six months of release, eventually becoming a million-seller. Smith sold two million records during her first year as a recording artist; her other successful records included “Gulf Coast Blues” (the flip side of “Down Hearted Blues”), “Aggravatin’ Papa,” “Baby Won’t You Please Come Home Blues,” and “T’ain’t Nobody’s Biz-Ness If I Do.” On the same day that her first record was released, Smith married Philadelphia nightwatchman Jack Gee, apparently her second marriage following the death of Earl Love, whom she had married circa 1920. Smith and Gee adopted a son, Jack Gee Jr., in 1926, but they had separated by 1929.

Smith’s success as a recording artist allowed her to become a top star on the black vaudeville circuit, and she toured the country extensively, traveling in her own Pullman railroad car but returning frequently to N.Y. to record. Her most popular records of 1925 included “The St. Louis Blues,” “Careless Love Blues,” and “I Ain’t Gonna Play No Second Fiddle,” all of which featured Armstrong on cornet. In 1926 “I Ain’t Got Nobody” and “Lost Your Head Blues” (written by Smith) were popular. By 1927, Smith was finding success with such standards as “After You’ve Gone” and “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” as she expanded her repertoire beyond blues to adapt to changing musical tastes. In 1928 her most popular records were “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and “Empty Bed Blues.” The latter was selected for the NARAS Hall of Fame in 1983.

Smith made her Broadway debut in the short-lived musical Pansy (N.Y, May 14, 1929) and the following month shot her only film appearance, starring in the 15-minute St. Louis Blues. (The film’s soundtrack is included on the album The Final Chapter. The Complete Recordings, Vol. 5, released by Columbia/Legacy Records in 1996.) Her last successful record was “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out,” released in August 1929, though Columbia continued to record her and release her records through the end of 1931.

Smith’s career went into decline at the end of the 1920s due to several factors, including the death of vaudeville in the face of radio and sound motion pictures and the onset of the Depression. She supported herself in part by making and selling bootleg liquor, but she continued to perform regularly during the early 1930s. Record executive John Hammond brought her back into the recording studio in November 1933 for four sides that turned out to be her final recordings. She was well received during an extended stay at Connie’s Inn on Times Square in N.Y. in 1936; she was on tour in 1937 when she was killed in an automobile accident. Shortly after her death, Hammond published an article in Down Beat magazine erroneously suggesting that she had bled to death after being refused admittance to a white hospital. This rumor served as the basis for Edward Albee’s play The Death of Bessie Smith, produced Off-Broadway in 1961; it was not definitively disproved until the publication of Chris Albertson’s biography in 1972.

Smith’s recordings were periodically reissued and continued to be popular over the years. Columbia issued four volumes of The Bessie Smith Story on LP in 1950–51; starting in June 1970, the company reissued all of her recordings on five double-LP sets—The World’s Greatest Blues Singer, Any Woman’s Blues, The Empress, Empty Bed Blues, and Nobody’s Blues but Mine—that sold in the hundreds of thousands. In the CD era Columbia/Legacy reissued the material as five double-CDs of The Complete Recordings, released between 1991 and 1996. Smith was the subject of Me and Bessie (N.Y., Oct. 22, 1975), a musical play conceived and written by Will Holt and Linda Hopkins, in which Hopkins portrayed Smith. The play ran on Broadway during the 1975–76 season and toured into 1977.

Bibliography

P. Oliver, B. S. (London, 1959); C. Moore, Somebody’s Angel: The Story of B. S. (N.Y., 1969); C. Albertson, B. (N.Y., 1972); C. Albertson and G. Schuller, B. S.: Empress of the Blues (N.Y., 1975); E. Brooks, The B. S. Companion: A Critical and Detailed Appreciation of the Recordings (N.Y., 1982); E. Feinstein, B. S.: Empress of the Blues (N.Y, 1985).

—William Ruhlmann